1. They no longer dominate your thoughts. Remember what it was like in the beginning? You couldn’t experience anything without a memory of ex coming in and hijacking it. Anything could trigger it: walking down an old block, looking at a sidewalk, hearing a certain song. It could be something meaningful or it could be something as arbitrary as a cloudy sky. It didn’t matter. They still held primary real estate in your brain and wouldn’t sell. Now whole entire weeks go by without them crossing your mind. Yay! You can have your mind back!

2. Running into them in public doesn’t make you want to puke all over yourself. It feels more like a subtle sting, which is totally manageable. You can do that.

3. You’re sleeping with someone else and it doesn’t feel foreign or wrong anymore. You’re not comparing bodies or techniques. It’s sex that stands on its own.

4. You start to forget things about the relationship, things you thought were important and would always hold dear. Nope. Time kills everything. Thankfully, it also heals it.

5. You don’t hate them anymore. If you still hate your ex, that means you’re still passionate about their existence and passion does not equal “over it.” Rather, you should be neutral slash respectful of them. They weren’t completely bad! They gave you orgasms and made you happy for at least a little while.

6. You’re no longer obsessively stalking their Internet presence and trying to think of ways where you can accidentally/on purpose run into them. Seriously, wasn’t that exhausting coordinating run-ins and trying to think of ways to insert your ex into the conversation so your friends would be forced to talk about them? Having a broken heart is like hiding a drug addiction! You don’t want anyone to know how badly you’re hurting so you turn to desperate measures to get your fix.

7. When your ex texts you to hang out, you can actually say no and mean it. It sounds like such a pathetic victory but it means everything.

8. Better yet, you’ve blocked their phone number.

9. You’re no longer terrified of loving someone. After a break up, love legit becomes something to fear. You wouldn’t touch it even if someone amazing was standing right in front of you. Now you’re open. You’re open to idea of loving someone else.

10. You’ve become honest about what the relationship really was and what it meant to you. After a relationship ends, you tend to either idealize it or think it was wretched. Usually though, it’s neither. It’s more nuanced than just “this was a bad relationship” or “this was a good relationship.”

11. You’ve developed a learning curve. You avoid things that will send you spiraling down memory lane. You protect yourself from the things that could hurt you. You’re not interested in making yourself feel bad anymore. These are all things you learn how to do after you’ve significantly humiliated yourself in a break up.

12. You stop keeping tabs on your ex to see who has won the “I’m over it! race. You know that keeping tabs will ensure that you finish last.

13. When you say that you’re happy for them and their new relationship, you mean it. Almost. Like, 90%.

This is for the women who are first to get naked, howl at the moon and jump into the sea. This is for the women who seek relentless joy; the ones who know how to laugh with their whole souls. The women who speak to strangers because they have no fear in their hearts. This is for the women who drink coffee at midnight and wine in the morning, and dare you to question it. This is for the women who throw down what they love, and don’t waste time following society’s pressures to exist behind a white picket fence. The women who create wildly, unbalanced, ferociously and in a blur at times. This — is for you.

“When Janne has a new poem written, I shut my life down to do nothing but read it, and then when I turn my life back on, everything is better.” — James Altucher